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Now, your car won't 'grope' in darkness!

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Don’t worry if the headlights of your car go on a strike while you drive back home at night on an isolated street after a busy schedule at office. Thanks to Winfotain, a unique device developed by Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu - a developer evangelist with Microsoft, Bangalore - which acts as an alert mechanism in dangerous situations.

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Works on the concept of Kinect

“Winfotain is a device which works on the concept of Kinect, a video game controller, developed by Microsoft. Kinect has got an in-built RGB camera and an IR camera (night vision camera), which doesn’t need light to work. If your car has been installed with the device, whenever lights in the car go off these cameras automatically turn on and act as virtual headlights to save you from possible dangers,” said Ramaprasanna at Spark IT 2011 here.

Ramaprasanna, who bagged the ‘Young Scientist of the Year’ award in 2005 conferred by Anna University, where he pursued his BTech, also developed a disaster alert system, barely two months after the devastating tsunami in 2004.

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The Winfotain runs on .Net applications and has an image processing APIs, which can recognize images. So when the driver closes his eyes for sometimes, it recognizes it and alerts him.

“If the car driver dozes off in the driving seat while on the move it alerts him with a beep sound. The image recognition mechanism in the device makes it possible. It also alerts the drivers with a vibration mechanism connected to the driving seat to avoid potential danger,” he added.

Ramaprasanna claimed that the device has lots of other unique features which make life a bit easier and more convenient than earlier. “You can watch live matches, news etc., even while driving, thanks to this device,” he said.

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Ramaprasanna, who always finds software development a fun, has developed a Buddy Home system at home and has some robots at his disposal to help him out in cleaning, cooking etc.

“Winfotain is a module to this Buddy Home system and it works on the basis of cloud computing. I have applied for the patent of the Winfotain device and Microsoft’s legal department is working on it,” he said.

The developer evangelist is now working on the project of Buddy home 2, which will be an upgraded version of Buddy Home 1, which will have better robotics mechanism.

“Right now Winfotain is a proof of concept. After necessary approvals and patents, I will market it and it will be affordable to all kinds of people,” he replied to a query on his marketing plans of Winfotain.

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